Paraesthesia: .NET Development and Some Pictures of My Cat

First Random Post of 2011

I find that I’m blogging less due to services like
Twitter that let me blurt out truncated,
incomplete thoughts and flush them from my mind without fully forming
them. That, plus the breakneck pace work has taken since I returned from
paternity leave, plus general malaise (in some cases) has yielded a bit
of a blog drought. I won’t apologize for not blogging because I hate
that. I just haven’t done it, and that’s that.

I do have some smaller, not fully-formed thoughts that I haven’t blasted
out in other forms, or maybe have tweeted about and dropped, so I
figured I’d flesh some of those out here. Maybe relieve a bit of the
psychic weight of that “to-do” list, as it were.

I sent out a request (over various media) for suggestions for
over-the-ear headphones that don’t pinch your ears. I got a few good
suggestions, but I should have explained requirements. Of course, that’s
hard to do over Twitter in 140 characters, so:

I’ll be using them (and leaving them) at work, so a $300 pair of
headphone is out. People can’t keep their hands off my stuff. I just
found one of my action figures on another guy’s desk last week. I
don’t need some spendy headphones getting “borrowed.”

I’ll mostly be listening to Pandora or
other fairly compressed music sources. They don’t have to be
reference quality.

I
ended up getting a cheap pair of Sony MDR-XD200
headphones. $22 at
Amazon at the time of this writing. I’m wearing them now, as I write
this, and they seem reasonably comfortable. The bass is a little light
in them, which, I’m sure, could be rectified by purchasing a more
expensive, higher quality set of headphones. For work, for now, these
will do.

If you find you’re being asked to do something that has no logic behind
it no matter which way you slice it, it’s probably politically
motivated. Think about it.

My wife, Jenn, who is awesome, proved she understands comics. I have
some sitting on my bedside table (stuff I’ve not read through yet) and
she was dusting. She moved the comics, dusted, waited quite some time to
ensure there was no residual Pledge hanging out, then washed and dried
her hands prior to replacing them. Like I said - awesome.

We still can’t really figure out which one of us my daughter, Phoenix,
looks like. It’s a common source of conversation for relatives, and I
entertain it well enough, but I really don’t care. Who does she look
like? I have no idea. You know what I do know? I know she smells like
me. If I let my hair grow long (which turns out more “big” than “long”),
fail to wash my hair, or don’t put gel in my hair one day, my head has a
very distinctive smell. You can smell my pillow and know which one is
mine. Anyway, Phoenix’s head smells like me. So out of a room of
identical kids, I’d still be able to find mine blindfolded. I think
that’s pretty awesome.

Speaking of Phoenix, we have noticed she is far easier to feed when
swaddled or otherwise incapacitated. If her arms are free, the bottle
gets close and suddenly she has this Incredible Hulk strength and the
arms fly up in front of her face into a sort of impenetrable forcefield
that makes it impossible to actually get the bottle to her mouth. Move
one arm and the other arm compensates. I totally can’t wait until she
has some semblance of muscle control.

I’m pondering getting a Kindle. From what I’ve seen, I’d probably end up
getting the smaller Kindle rather than the Kindle DX. I’ve done some
research on e-readers and based on price and my general use case, I
think the Kindle would work out nicely. If anything, it’d help me
determine how often I use an e-reader. Eventually I want to get an iPad
(on which I would use the Kindle app for reading), but given my
propensity to constantly tweak
things,
my budget, and my Android-based phone, I think a Kindle is a good start.

I am thinking about getting a sound bar for our game room. Right now we
have a full home theater system up there (receiver, game systems, TV,
etc.) but the speakers I have up there are these giant towers that are
nearly impossible to place reasonably given the room layout. That and my
lack of ability/desire to start running wires all over leave me either
with a wireless setup or a sound bar. I know you audiophiles will get up
in my grill about sound quality and immersion and I know. I hear you.
It’s just, again, a wire and size issue. Perhaps a decent set of
satellite speakers and a throw rug would also answer the question, given
that a decent sound bar costs more (in some cases) than an equivalent
satellite speaker system with a subwoofer.

I
have been reading The Hunger
Games based on the
recommendation from just about everyone and it is a very compelling
read. It’s the first book I’ve been sucked into in a while. I suppose
that sort of pegs me as one of those people who doesn’t read complex
stories or try to expand their reading level. You’re probably right. I
don’t think the comics in The New Yorker are generally funny (which
doesn’t mean I don’t understand them, just that I don’t think they’re
funny); I don’t agree that most of the “classics” you’re forced to read
during school are worth spending the time and effort on; and when I read
for fun I don’t really want to have to expend a ton of mental effort to
try and figure out what the book is trying to say. I want to have fun,
relax, and escape for a while. If that means I end up reading books that
show up in the “teen” section of the bookstore more often than not,
well… so be it.

I [still] hate Facebook. I hate that most of the comments people leave
on there have “LOL” somewhere in them, overused to the point it has lost
meaning and is almost more punctuation than anything. I hate that people
won’t actually send you a damn email when they have your email address
and instead will do some “post to your wall” or “Facebook message”
bullshit. I hate that people will leave entirely unrelated comments on
things (e.g., post a picture of a house plant and get, “Hey, didn’t see
you over the holidays. How was your Christmas?”). I hate that people
pretty much abandon spelling, grammar, and punctuation, especially given
Facebook doesn’t have the message length limitations Twitter has that
would otherwise require the abbreviations and shortcuts. Yeah, I could
go on all day about how much I really despise it, even amidst its
obvious ubiquity on the net. I’m sure there will come a day when
“Facebook” equates to “internet” for people the way that “the world-wide
web” currently generally equates to “internet” for people. Get off my
lawn, young punks.

I have been told by various relatives and friends that I should write a
book. I’ve considered it. It’d be something you find in the humor
section that has random stories and rants and sells 150 copies total.
There are actually several reasons I haven’t.

Most of the stories people encourage me to write about would only be
funny to people who were there or who know the people involved. “Had
to be there,” as it were.

Of the remaining stories, they’re mostly at the expense of a friend
or family member, and they’d only be thinly-veiled. I could probably
embellish and change things a bit, but the people who know would
know exactly what I was talking about and I don’t really want to
hurt anyone’s feelings. Even if it would be pretty funny.

When I tell stories, I talk with my hands. You’d miss that in book
form, and trust me, it adds to the story.

There would probably be a lot of dick and fart jokes, which is not
something, I think, that most people expect from me. Well, people
who don’t know me, right? RIGHT?

Anyway, no book. Maybe later in life, in retirement, when it won’t
matter anymore. I’m sure there’s a market for that story about the
wedding that had the midget in the cowboy outfit. Just not quite yet.